Perpetuating conflict
United States President Donald Trump's recent visit to Saudi Arabia has left many officials gushing in the Arabian kingdom. They have called Trump's visit to Riyadh as "historic" while arguing that his meeting with the rulers of the Gulf Cooperation Council was a "landmark event". Washington, however, had decided to tone down the euphoria and merely stated that the visit had "reset" relations between the two nations following a period of strain during former President Barack Obama's tenure.
Obama had repeatedly raised concerns about the Saudi kingdom's disastrous human rights record, while on the side offering it a record $115-billion package for arms, other military equipment and training. Trump, at least, shied away from the hypocrisy of the Obama era by declaring that disagreements on human rights were an impediment to growing trade between the two nations. Another important take away from Trump's visit is a return to Washington's default foreign policy position it has adopted since the late 1970s vis-à-vis Iran. Trump promised the Saudi Arabian establishment and other autocrats, including the King of Bahrain and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt that he would work with them "to isolate Iran". Sidestepping the clear sectarian framework within which the Sunni monarchs of the GCC frame their fraught relationship with Iran (a Shia-dominated nation), Trump embarked on a US-Saudi military cooperation agreement worth $350 billion over a span of 10 years.
import of "lots of beautiful military equipment" in the words of Trump will only exacerbate the turmoil in the region. "While Saudi Arabia spends countless millions promoting fear of Iran to distract from its global export of Wahhabism — which inspires the extremist ideology of Al Qaeda, the so-called Islamic State and many other terrorist groups wreaking havoc from Karachi to Manchester — Iran has been aiding the victims of extremism in Iraq and Syria," says Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammed Javed Zarif, in a column for the New York Times.
"By helping to prevent the Islamic State from seizing Baghdad and Damascus, Iran is actively promoting a political solution to the conflicts in both countries." While Iran's humanitarian claims are evidently contestable, their attempts towards framing a political resolution of these conflicts are not. Even for the war-ravaged Yemen, which is in the midst of a conflict between Houthi rebels and Saudi forces, Iran has proposed a four-point peace plan. There is little international pressure on the Saudis to discuss peace. Instead, the United States is behaving like a mercenary, selling their arms and further embroiling the region in conflict, while failing to address the underlying issues that fan violent extremism.
